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I am Stefania Dinea, an architect who mixes 3D printing, VR, parametric design and blogging daily and I will share some of my 3D printing tips & tricks with you. This series is my overview about the process and my work-around. Please feel free to comment and add.

It took me over two years to learn that the best material for a printer is the one wearing the manufacturers logo, therefore the best material for an Ultimaker is Ultimaker material. Not only that, but Ultimaker has been nice enough not only to incorporate their own material settings into cura but also some generic settings that may include materials that are not necessarily apart of the Ultimaker family. This scenario allows you to focus on your goal – fast prototyping your idea and not spend to much time and energy on custom settings. However if you are a tinker – cura and the ultimaker machine will allow you to push your imagination into reality – with enough custom settings to break new boundaries.

To conclude, when in doubt – go with what works!

When handling materials, especially new ones, I do strongly recommend beginning with the recommended settings already found in cura.

However, in Architecture I found it most useful to also restrict the type of materials to new adventurers in the field of 3D printing to PLA and PVA (If an UM 3 or higher is available). Personally, I think a UM2 still adds a lot of value to the education side, because it forces a different type of mentality, one that is design altering.

Another thing that I like to custom make in cura is tailor my materials, to also include the price, therefore getting a material cost/printed piece and also include the producer and the supplier, so I always know which materials I use with what. First, you begin by downloading the technical data sheet of the material:

These are the very useful information such as weight, and also ability to figure out the density of your filament.

So, to create a custom new material, you go to Manage Printers> Materials>Create

Using the information I already have, it is easy to fill in the info (in this example the cost is fictive)

And the result looks something like this:

As you can see, when you tweak your materials there are some benefits, not only accurately calculating how much time it needs to complete a job, or how much material, but also it helps prove the point that 3D printing is affordable in terms of material cost.

Here are also my general all purpose printing settings (I only use this on UM machines and only when I use PLA)

Layer height - 0.2 therefore top bottom thickness should be a multiply of this 0.2*6=1.2

Nozzle 0.4 so wall thickness should be a multiple of that 0.4*3=1.2

I have noticed I can take up the printing speed to 100 mm/s in cases of extreme urgency, which is almost always. I do not prefer to print with brim, but I always want to start my print with a skirt.

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Always great to see someone else settings to save time on tinkering! I have tended to stick with the defaults and only altering thicknesses to match nozzle size multiples as there is rarely time to experiment from day to day!

Thanks for sharing this, please keep up the great work!

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Always great to see someone else settings to save time on tinkering! I have tended to stick with the defaults and only altering thicknesses to match nozzle size multiples as there is rarely time to experiment from day to day!

Thanks for sharing this, please keep up the great work!

I have to admit I was tought the multiply rule and trick of my settings by someone who was trained by Ultimaker - so it was a sort of chain effect :))

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Ultimaker Cura 4.0 is mainly focused on the improved user interface and cloud integration.
As always, we want to collect your user feedback for this release. If there are any improvements you can think of, feel free to mention it here and help us to shape the next release.